JIRA story point totals using Ruby and Rest

I’m using a hosted version of JIRA and needed to obtain quick totals based on filters that I have setup. I could not find any easy documentation online so I thought I’d share my quick hack. The REST API is very well documented and uses the same JQL as the filters do. In order to view the commit list for an iteration I have some JQL that looks like: fixversion = 20120611 and fixversion was 20120611 ON “2012/06/11” AND status NOT IN (canceled, “on hold”)...

June 12, 2012 · 2 min · Aaron Held

the measure of Awesome

Development at work has been trending well in the new year and the team is getting excited about our formal incorporation of practices such as TDD and pair programming. I’m definitely perceive an intangible benefit in culture and fun. With a full test suite and engaged developers working out loud coding is fun again. I give a lot of thought to developer efficiency and generating metrics around our output is very important to me....

January 23, 2011 · 2 min · Aaron Held

Jugaad - India's Agile style

I’ve been reading about India’s concept of Jugaad, possibly poised to enter our buzzword vocabulary since it came up in the context of what Obama can learn from that country. Where the Agile Manifesto starts with “Individuals and Interactions” the Harvard Business Review kicks off Jugaad with “Thrift not Waste”. All too often I’ve seen Agile work because a scarcity of resources (money, time or knowledge) pushed an otherwise waterfall loving group into giving Agile a shot....

November 14, 2010 · 2 min · Aaron Held

Project Management is critical for Useless projects

This about this: If you have a project with an estimated cost of $1MM and you expect a return of $1.1MM then strict governance and process controls are critical to success. A variance of 10% will take you from profitability to a loss. If you have a project with the same estimated $1MM cost but an expected return of $50MM then project management is less critical. a 10% variance will not really matter in the big picture....

July 17, 2009 · 1 min · Aaron Held

Peeling back the onion of stupidity

I’ve mentioned the book Adrenaline Junkiesin a previous post and I’m not seeing the value in a common language for discussing problems. Today’s pattern is the ‘Onion of Stupidity’. This is a common pattern where you build up hack upon workaround upon compromise, inject a little shortsightedness and wind up seeing a good chunk of your effort goes into cleaning it up. A colleague here promoted the term “technical debt” to describe issues were we these types of issues and help us prioritize them....

May 7, 2009 · 2 min · Aaron Held